This work in progress.
2 Performance tuning (zabbix.com)
2.1 Hardware
Use fastest processor available
Having more memory is always better
2.2 Operating System
Exclude unnecessary functionality from kernel
2.3 Zabbix configuration parameters
Many parameters may be tuned to get optimal performance.
2.3.1 zabbix_server
StartPollers
General rule – keep value of this parameter as low as possible. Every additional instance of zabbix_server adds known overhead, in the same time, parallelism is increased. Optimal number of instances is achieved when queue, on average, contains minimum number of parameters (ideally, 0 at any given moment). This value can be monitored by using internal check zabbix[queue].
DebugLevel
Optimal value is 3.
DBSocket
MySQL only. It is recommended to use DBSocket for connection to the database. That is the fastest and the most secure way.
2.4 Database Engine
This is probably most important part of Zabbix tuning. Zabbix heavily depends on availability and performance of database engine.
- use fastest database engine, i.e. MySQL
- use stable release of a database engine
- rebuild MySQL or PostgreSQL from sources to get maximum performance
- follow performance tuning instructions taken from MySQL or PostgreSQL documentation
- for MySQL, use InnoDB table structure
- ZABBIX works at least 1.5 times faster (comparing to MyISAM) if InnoDB is used. This is because of increased parallelism. However, InnoDB requires more CPU power.
- tuning the database server for the best performance is highly recommended.
- keep database tables on different hard disks
- ‘history’, ‘history_str, ‘items’ ‘functions’, triggers’, and ‘trends’ are most heavily used tables.
- for large installations, keeping of MySQL temporary files in tmpfs is recommended
2.5 General advices
- monitor required parameters only
- tune ‘Update interval’ for all items. Keeping small update interval may be good for nice graphs, however, this may overload Zabbix
- tune parameters for default templates
- tune housekeeping parameters
- do not monitor parameters which return same information.
Example: why use system[procload],system[procload5] andsystem[procload15] if system[procload] contains all.
avoid use of triggers with long period given as function argument. For example, max(3600) will be calculated significantly slower than max(60).
Graphs with alerts
Dashboards
